It's a bit of a leap to assume that not wanting or allowing your 11-year-old to watch pornography means that such topics (presumably, sex) are completely "taboo" in the home.
The difference is that my comment didn't suggest anyone had an unhealthy home environment based on their opinion on this topic. The parent comment did.
The utter stupidity of that idea is along the sames lines as rhetoric, also present in OP, that Russia "weaponized" its gas pipelines. (To use that language, nearly anything can be a "weapon.") I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say that I won't take seriously anything that doesn't immediately address how insane those initial accusations, of Russian sabotage of its own pipelines, were.
But Hersh's essay indicates there were last-minute changes to the detonation method. That adds risk, which could have manifested as failure of some detonations.
Why wouldn't be sloppy? Remember the Afghanistan pull out? The US is capable of screw ups. Unless of course people were falling down from planes and busses with kids and women were droned tactically?
>The utter stupidity of that idea is along the sames lines as rhetoric, also present in OP, that Russia "weaponized" its gas pipelines
Cutting off energy a nation's energy supply in violation of an established trade agreement, as a response to an escalating conflict between nations, is economic warfare. The term "weaponized" is used correctly in this sense and the author was not engaging in hyperbole.
Modern hybridized warfare is fought across a number of spaces: legal, political, economic, ecological, informational, 'cyber', etc, etc.
We no longer have the luxury of believing the warfare only involves weapons with purely kinetic effects. This is not the way Russia conducts war anymore nor has it been for the last few decades if not more. Conventional military action is always the last resort or the culminating event in modern campaigns.
>I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say that I won't take seriously anything that doesn't immediately address how insane those initial accusations, of Russian sabotage of its own pipelines, were.
Can you honestly justify any actions that Russia has taken openly over the last few years as sane? Countries run by viscous autocrats who have consolidated power often make decisions which suit their personal interests more than the those of the nation. Many in Europe and the US have made the mistake of assessing Putin's strategies as being 'Russia's strategy' and therefore unlikely because it would be bad for Russia. When in fact Putin's strategies serve him just fine because he doesn't give a shit about Russians.
“We have repeatedly said that the movement of our armed forces on our own territory should be of no concern to anyone. Russia poses no threat to anyone.”
> Russia dismisses the accusations, claiming they are not going to invade Ukraine.
What's your point? That the Russian gov't is capable of lying, therefore they blew up the pipelines? What if I said that the US lied about weapons of mass destruction, therefore the US must have blown up the pipelines? It seems like a non-sequitur. State governments can deceive, especially about their plans for war.
That said, I'm not supporting Russia in this war, nor Ukraine. So I'm not going to participate any further in this other debate about the war that you appear to want to have.
Can you name a single other instance in history where a country at war significantly damaged its ability to raise money for the war to “send a message”? What exactly is the message? The US didn’t think Russia had a submersible and some C4 and now they do?
Well, a strategic goal to let Europeans suffer during winter in order to shatter our resolve to support Ukraine, while avoiding contractual penalties for unilateral cessation of gaz delivery, can explain the benefit of exploding the pipeline. This can explain also the fact that the fourth pipe was left intact - as a potential carrot to Europe...
I do not pretend that the above is truth, but it seams to be a plausible explanation.
I don't see why this is so downvoted. People are doing a lot of mental gymnastics to discount the possibility of Russian sabotage here and I really don't understand why that is. Nothing is certain, but I think it's silly to discount Russia being responsible it for the reasons people are giving.
I’m genuinely curious where the gymnastic is? I am asking in good faith. What is Russia’s interest in sabotaging it? They can’t sell gas to fund their war machine.
What’s the US interest? Now Europe must buy LNG from our fantastic gas companies. US exports of LNG are at an all time high price. Europe is pissed off at our rival. Not to mention our commander in chief threatened to blow it up, why?
Everything here says it’s in the interest of the USA, not Russia. I don’t feel like I’m bending any logic, in fact I feel like this is the only common sense way to think about it.
What people are saying is that he wouldn't be stupid enough to kill off something that is a vital source of foreign currency in wartime, and could be used as leverage in negotiating with the EU. Except it wasn't operational and was proving to be useless as a bargaining chip.
The gymnastics come in believing that the guy who was willing to throw caution to the wind in starting a war with Ukraine (causing his economy to take a hammering and killing trade with the EU, running the real risk of pushing NATO entirely into NATO's arms) is somehow going to be precious about a pipeline that had ceased to have any value. I don't see it.
Russia is the only country who could do it without risking provoking a war.
Russia knew they weren’t going to make any money on it due to the strong reaction to the war on Ukraine.
Russia could have decided to do it to remind Western Europe that it could do the same to other pipelines they depend on.
None of that is determinative that Russia did do it, but it’s sufficient to me to indicate that they could have done it, and insisting that it’s absurd is, well, absurd.
Russia is also not a single actor. There are factions, and they have different interests. The "liberals" aka the economic bloc in the administration - who know full well what kind of shitshow is ahead in the long term - would prefer the war to die down, and for gas to start flowing again, preferably in exchange for dropping sanctions. Because of that, they're a potential threat to the war faction; think of how some parts of the German military repeatedly tried to arrange for secret negotiations with the Allies for an example of how it could materialize. But if there are no pipelines, the "liberals" have no gas to offer in exchange for concessions even if they somehow manage to stop the war and remove the war party from power. This makes their platform less attractive.
(To be clear, this is all just conjecture. The factions are real enough, and have motives that could make players in this game, but it's obviously not the only viable explanation.)
I find this the most likely scenario too. Blowing up the pipeline cemented that Europe wasn't going to get Russian gas for the winter. It left less maneuvering room to any interest groups that could've used it as a bargaining chip as Europe was heading into winter and many expected widespread heating and power issues, some local authorities in Europe even planned for possible mass evacuations of vulnerable population. Gas was the most valuable concession that anyone in Russia could've made. Pipeline blew up and that was off the table. Nobody knew at the time that winter 2022/2023 was going to be exceptionally warm and in hindsight it's easy to downplay those fears and percieved value of the pipeline.
You know the USA sends sophisticated military weapons and training to Ukraine including actual HIMARS used to blow up a Russian barrack and kill 400 Russians?
But you think the USA blowing up an inactive pipeline might be the thing that provokes a war and therefore the USA would never do it?
My best guess as to Russian interest is that by performing the sabotage in a difficult-to-attribute manner it plants the seeds for anti-US (and by extent, anti-Ukraine) sentiment in the public perception in the EU. More or less the governments of EU countries need the will of the people to back military aid to Ukraine, so giving the public something to latch on to from an anti-US perspective is valuable in that it could lower or prevent aid.
The Russians can also probably be secure in knowing that NATO won't publicly identify Russia as responsible as that would probably mean war and it has been very clear that NATO's top priority is avoiding the spread of the war in Ukraine.
There are some other possible Russian motivations I've seen, but put less stock in like capability demonstration and limiting incentives for a coup.
You need to stop thinking like a rational capitalist. It's a common problem for westerners to try to look at Russia from this angle.
It makes the cost of energy go up in Europe and the US, which exacerbates the existing problem of monetary inflation caused by the recent pandemic. It was meant as punishment for the West's support of Ukraine to increase civil discontent with the existing pro-Ukraine western governments. This allows the electorate to be more receptive to populist candidates funded by Russia with anti-Ukraine positions which will give Russia what they want.
Then, Ukraine goes to Russia, gas goes back to Europe via the still intact pipeline, European money goes back to Russia, and Russia wins.
That scale of sabotage wasn’t a casual act. Russia knew Europe was going to shut down its imports anyway, so perhaps it was a threat, but one that didn’t involve casus belli.
Russia was the only country that could do that without risk of widening the war.
I’m not saying they did do it, but I see no reason for everyone to insist it’s obviously false.
> The US didn’t think Russia had a submersible and some C4 and now they do?
The US wasn’t the target, European powers were, and the message was about will (though like other Russian threats over the same policy issue, it was a false message, despite the dramatic form), more than material capacity.
Russia comes to mind, in the weeks before the explosions when they launched a ridiculous cascade of excuses about why they can't fulfill contracts on the existing, undamaged pipe. They quite literally left huge amounts of money on the table only to send a message. Must have been difficult, internally, to keep up.
Germany declared war on Russia which was allied with France. And Germany did not declare war on any of those countries out of will, but due to an alliance with the Austro-Hungarian empire.
As parent said, Germany didn’t declare war willingly, they had no choice but supporting the alliance. You cannot just change sides in war as it suits you.
For starters, Germany declared war on Russia five days before Austria-Hungary did. But even if it were otherwise, they still had a choice whether to honor their obligations or not.
Furthermore, there's substantial evidence that Germany - or rather, some German factions - was very specifically pressuring Austria into a war, precisely so that it could then be "joined":
Extremely far-fetched, you'd have to convince me that the Russian government and military are full of total morons.
Building a pipeline is not cheap, not in money or time or bureaucratic effort. It's easier to just stop supplying the gas if you want to make an obvious threat.
> Extremely far-fetched, you'd have to convince me that the Russian government and military are full of total morons.
They launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine while denying they were doing so and failed at every one of their military objectives while causing their economy to collapse due to the massive worldwide sanctions. What other evidence could you require?
Exactly. Putin started an incredibly expensive war that could prove to be financially ruinous for Russia, I don't know why we're supposed to believe he wouldn't be so careless about a pipeline that wasn't even operational at the time. I'm not claiming to know who did this, but I don't think we can say it couldn't possibly be Russia
Part of the credibility of either account lies in the source. The source of one is a highly awarded investigative journalist legend with a history of verifying his anonymous sources in government and never published anything false TMK. The other account comes from a publication owned by a billionaire contractor to the department of defense.
I suspect the ratings are partly based on expectations. Eating a duck fetus doesn't mess with someone's expectations nearly as much as getting "vegetable roll" and it's really a hunk of beef.
But I'm not sure how they actually rated these. Does seem silly, but a fun list to see some foods I've never heard of before.
I still remember when a company I worked for had a spreadsheet where people were anonymously sharing their salary information along w/ title, demography, notes, etc. Most of the people who posted their info with some self-perception that their salary was "low" for the role added notes to the spreadsheet suggesting they think it's "low" because of racism or sexism.
To you, that might be good, positive, and normal. IMO it was toxic and fueled by envy with no actual information to support their position (and, admittedly, no information to deny it either). They only wanted my salary information to help progress their position in life, which to me is not so different from Google or Facebook wanting such private information for their own monetary gain.
> The bill takes a wrecking ball to the very fabric of encryption, by requiring encrypted messaging apps to scan for abusive content within the app (or the app’s underlying operating system).
Perhaps I misunderstand the analogy, but this doesn't seem to do anything to the "very fabric of encryption."
It certainly would make me have zero trust in any encrypted messaging apps that continue to operate in the UK and follow this law. Otherwise, anyone who wants to have truly encrypted messaging can do this on their own. And if the barrier of entry for learning how to sign messages is too high, I don't doubt that open source encrypted messaging apps already exist or will quickly come into existence and will refuse to comply with laws like these.
What are they going to do, force math to comply with their laws?
Unsure why you had to turn this into a dig at Michael Jordan.
And before you say it's not a dig at him, what could possibly be the implication of calling Kareem a true "winner" in comparison to the previous statement about a competitor like Jordan who always wants to win?
Did I miss something where Michael Jordan said he doesn't want to spend time with his kids or grandkids if he has them? Is that what the "fuck them kids" meme is actually about?
Seems to imply that in the world of professional basketball there's something wrong with the being ultra competitive and desiring to win and defeat one's enemies and winning a championship and that, instead, being a family man is more the real measure of success. Which, if true, I think both sports fans and sports organizations have all missed the memo.
My buddy Chuck is a great family man. Not a great ball player. Should he join the NBA?
> Is that what the "fuck them kids" meme is actually about?
I think this meme is about MJ's general disdain for signing autographs or taking pics with people even famous people like rappers. He is the classic example of "never meet your heroes". Which, again, even if he is the biggest prick off court, it hardly detracts from his reputation as being one of the greatest NBA players, and arguably, thee most famous athlete across all sports, of all time.
In other words, even though Gretzky, for example, is greater than MJ in terms of stats, no one had a bigger presence in the '80s and '90s than MJ around the world across all sports fandoms.
You could start by going through some Accounting or Finance videos from edu sites like Khan Academy, and also spend some time looking at the financials for public companies on a site like Yahoo Finance. Annual statements are also available on EDGAR (https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch) rather than, e.g., Yahoo Finance, but maybe a bit harder to parse even though its closer to source data.
I think you only need some basics to learn how to look at a financial statement and understand information like whether or not the company is profitable, or roughly how long the company can survive if things continue the way they are, or get better, or get worse. If you want to be able to really understand and assess a business and its financial health based on these statements, I'm not sure you can just learn that. I certainly don't have the confidence that I can do that yet. My feeling is that I'd probably have to work in the industry in some capacity where I am looking at this information daily, across dozens or hundreds of companies.
At best, I can pick up on anomalies that can later be explained (e.g., I saw there was a large amount of cash added to GitLab in the past year, and later it was clear that this was largely because of their IPO, which seems obvious but nobody told me there was an IPO before reading the statements (granted, the existence of the statements tend to imply this is a publicly-traded company)). That gives me some confidence that I know what I am reading, but I haven't done much outside of Khan Academy videos and taking a university-level accounting 101 course where I learned about the accounting equation, the accounting cycle, and how to write financial statements based on the financial events for a business.
Interesting. Looks like the bulk of their spend is on sales and marketing, which I suppose makes sense in that these companies require using this kind of money to acquire new customers. But obviously that spells out the questions, how sustainable is this business model, and also, how much of this are they decreasing in addition to or as part of the layoffs?
This is on the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations. Total OpEx: 351,625; Sales and Marketing as part of that is 190,754 or about 54% of their operating expenses. I don't read finance statements that often so I don't know how normal this is for the industry.
